Julia Stiles facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Julia Stiles
Stiles in 2007
Born	Julia O'Hara Stiles (1981-03-28) March 28, 1981 (age 44) New York City, U.S.
Education	Columbia University (BA)
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1993–present
Spouse(s)	Preston J. Cook ​ (m. 2017)​
Children	3

Julia O'Hara Stiles (born March 28, 1981) is an American actress. Born and raised in New York City, Stiles began acting at the age of 11 as part of New York's La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Her film debut was a small role at age 15 in I Love You, I Love You Not (1996), followed by a lead role in Wicked (1998) for which she received the Karlovy Vary Film Festival Award for Best Actress. She rose to prominence with leading roles in teen films such as 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), Down to You (2000), and Save the Last Dance (2001). Her accolades include a Teen Choice Award and two MTV Movie Awards, as well as nominations for a Golden Globe Award, and Primetime Emmy Award.

Stiles added to her list of credits with films such as The Business of Strangers (2001), Mona Lisa Smile (2003), and The Omen (2006), and became known to audiences worldwide with her portrayal of Nicky Parsons in the Bourne franchise (2002–2016). Her other notable film credits include Hamlet, State and Main (both 2000), O (2001), A Guy Thing (2002), Carolina (2003), The Prince & Me (2004), Edmond, A Little Trip to Heaven (both 2005), The Cry of the Owl (2009), Silver Linings Playbook (2012), Out of the Dark (2014), Blackway (2015), 11:55 (2016) and Orphan: First Kill (2022).

Outside of film, Stiles played Lumen Pierce on the fifth season of Dexter (2010), earning nominations for the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress and the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress. From 2012 to 2014 she appeared as the titular character in the web series Blue, for which she earned two IAWTV Awards for Best Actress. From 2017 to 2020 she starred as Georgina Ryland on the Sky Atlantic series Riviera. She starred in the Amazon series The Lake (2022–2023).

Early life and education

Stiles was born in New York City to parents Judith Newcomb Stiles, a Greenwich Village artist, and John O'Hara, a businessman. She is the oldest of three children; her siblings are John Junior and Jane (also an actress). Stiles is of English, Irish, and Italian descent. She started acting at age 11, performing with New York's La MaMa Theatre Company.

Career

Film and television

After finding an agent, Stiles began auditioning for television in 1993 and films in 1996. She made her acting debut in 1993 on the mystery show Ghostwriter as Erica Dansby.

Stiles's first film role was in I Love You, I Love You Not (1996), with Claire Danes and Jude Law. She also had small roles as Harrison Ford's character's daughter in Alan J. Pakula's The Devil's Own (1997) and in M. Night Shyamalan's Wide Awake (1998). Her first lead was in Wicked (1998). Critic Joe Baltake wrote she was "the darling of the 1998 Sundance Film Festival." She next starred in the TV miniseries The '60s in 1999.

Stiles was cast at the age of 17 for the role of Kat Stratford, opposite Heath Ledger in Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You, an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew set in a high school in Seattle. She won an MTV Movie Award for Breakthrough Female Performance for the role. The Chicago Film Critics voted her the most promising new actress of the year. Her next starring role was in Down to You (2000), which was panned by critics, but earned both her and her co-star Freddie Prinze, Jr. a Teen Choice Award nomination for their on-screen chemistry. She subsequently appeared in two more Shakespearean adaptations. The first was as Ophelia in Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000), with Ethan Hawke in the lead. The second was in the Desdemona role, opposite Mekhi Phifer, in Tim Blake Nelson's O (2001), a version of Othello set at a boarding school. Neither film was a great success; O was subject to many delays and a change of distributors, and Hamlet was an art house film shot on a minimal budget.

Stiles's next commercial success was in Save the Last Dance (2001) as an aspiring ballerina forced to leave her small town in downstate Illinois to live with her struggling musician father in Chicago after her mother dies in a car accident. At her new, nearly all-black school, she falls in love with the character played by Sean Patrick Thomas who teaches her hip-hop dance steps that help get her into the Juilliard School. The role won her two more MTV awards for Best Kiss and Best Female Performance and a Teen Choice Award for best fight scene for her battle with Bianca Lawson. Rolling Stone named her "the coolest co-ed" and put her on the cover of its April 12, 2001, issue. She told Rolling Stone that she performed all her own dancing in the film, except for some closeups of the feet.

Stiles being interviewed by Mark Steines, 2007

Stiles appeared opposite Stockard Channing in the dark art house film The Business of Strangers (2001) as a conniving, amoral secretary who exacts revenge on her boss. Channing was impressed by her co-star: "In addition to her talent, she has a quality that is almost feral, something that can make people uneasy. She has an effect on people." Stiles later described the Bourne franchise as very important for her career, stating that it "reinvented the action genre, especially for female characters". Her small role as Treadstone operative Nicolette "Nicky" Parsons in The Bourne Identity (2002) grew in The Bourne Supremacy (2004), then greatly expanded in The Bourne Ultimatum (2007).

Between the Bourne films, she appeared in Mona Lisa Smile (2003) as Joan, a student at Wellesley College in 1953, whose art professor (Julia Roberts) encourages her to pursue a career in law rather than become a wife and mother. Critic Stephen Holden called her one of cinema's "brightest young stars", but the film met with generally unfavorable reviews. Stiles played a Wisconsin college student who is swept off her feet by a Danish prince, played by Luke Mably, in The Prince and Me (2004), directed by Martha Coolidge. Stiles told an interviewer that she was very similar to her character Paige Morgan. Critic Scott Foundas said she was "irrepressibly engaging" and the film was a "strange career choice for Stiles". This echoed criticism in reviews of A Guy Thing (2003), a romantic comedy with Jason Lee and Selma Blair. Critic Dennis Harvey wrote that Stiles was "wasted" and Holden called her "a serious actress from whom comedy does not seem to flow naturally". In 2006, Stiles starred opposite her Hamlet co-star Liev Schreiber in The Omen, a remake of the 1976 horror film. She returned to the Bourne series with a much larger role in The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), her highest-grossing film to date.

Stiles acted in Between Us (2012) with Taye Diggs, David Harbour, and Melissa George. Between Us is the screen adaptation of the off-Broadway play of the same name by Joe Hortua. Stiles starred alongside David Cross and America Ferrera in the dark comedy It's a Disaster. The film premiered at the 2012 Los Angeles Film Festival and was picked up by Oscilloscope Laboratories and received a limited release the next year. Stiles had a small but pivotal role as a reporter in the 2013 British-American film Closed Circuit. Stiles starred in the indie supernatural thriller Out of the Dark (2014) alongside Scott Speedman and Stephen Rea.

In 2015, Stiles signed on to reprise her role as Nicky Parsons in Jason Bourne, the fifth installment of the Bourne franchise. She also featured as Courtney, the wayward mother of Sophie Nélisse, in The Great Gilly Hopkins (2016).

Stage

While Stiles performed in a school play in fourth grade, Bob McGrath of Ridge Theater in Manhattan, a friend of her parents, needed an actor for a nonspeaking role. Stiles's first theatrical roles were in works by author/composer John Moran at Ridge Theater from 1993 to 1998. In the summer of 2002, she appeared as Viola, the lead role in Shakespeare in the Park's production of Twelfth Night with Jimmy Smits.

In 2004, she made her West End stage debut opposite Aaron Eckhart in a revival of David Mamet's play Oleanna at the Garrick Theatre. She reprised the role of Carol in a 2009 production of Oleanna, directed by Doug Hughes and co-starring Bill Pullman at the Mark Taper Forum. The production moved to Broadway's John Golden Theatre.

Stiles was to play Jeannie in a production of Neil LaBute's Fat Pig directed by the playwright beginning in spring 2011, but the show was postponed indefinitely.

Other work

Stiles appeared in the video for Cyndi Lauper's single "Sally's Pigeons" in 1993. In 2001, she hosted Saturday Night Live and returned to parody as then-President George W. Bush's daughter Jenna Bush. MTV profiled her in its Diary series in 2003, and she was Punk'd by Ashton Kutcher at a Washington, D.C., museum in 2004.

In 2010, Stiles played a major role in 10 episodes of the Showtime series Dexter For this role, she received a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Series, Miniseries or Television Film, as well as a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series.

Stiles played Maisy-May in the Canadian Amazon Prime series The Lake. Maisy-May is the "picture-perfect" stepdaughter/stepsister who was given the family cottage by her stepfather, to the dismay of her stepbrother Justin. Season 1 premiered in summer 2022.

Film director

Stiles made her writing and directorial debut with Elle magazine's short Raving starring Zooey Deschanel. It premiered at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.

Stiles' first feature film as a director, Wish You Were Here, was released in January 2025.

Personal life

Stiles graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English literature in 2005. She almost turned down the first Bourne film because of college exams, and deferred a semester for the first two films. At Columbia she dated actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the two lived in John Jay Hall. She and actor David Harbour were in a relationship between 2011 and 2015. In 2010, she received a John Jay Award, an honorary award given annually to five alumni by the Columbia College Alumni Association for professional achievements.

Stiles has also worked for Habitat for Humanity, building housing in Costa Rica, and has worked with Amnesty International to raise awareness of the harsh conditions of immigration detention of unaccompanied juveniles. In January 2004, Marie Claire featured Stiles's trip to witness conditions at the Berks County Youth Center in Leesport, Pennsylvania.

Stiles is a former vegan, occasionally eating red meat. She says she gave up veganism after she developed anemia and found it difficult to get proper nutrition while traveling.

She has described herself as a feminist and wrote about the subject in The Guardian.

She is a fan of baseball and the New York Mets. She threw the ceremonial first pitch before their May 29, 2006 game.

In September 2017 Stiles married camera assistant Preston J. Cook with whom she worked on Blackway. They have three children.

Selected filmography

Film

Television

Theme park

Theatre

Awards and nominations

See also

In Spanish: Julia Stiles para niños